Third Starship test launch attempt

J

Jim Logajan

Administrator
Staff member
SpaceX is going to attempt a third test launch of its Starship series of rockets tomorrow (Mar. 14, 2024) at 7:00 AM CT. Guess I'll need to set an alarm just in case, though I'm often awake by then but not always inclined to get out of bed!

I suppose if I had to bet on an outcome I'd wager a few bucks on successful suborbital entry of the second stage and "landing" of the booster on the ocean surface. I'd bet against successful reentry of the second stage and be happy to lose that bet.
 
Or party all night in anticipation of the launch going well? It is a very ambitious and interesting project.

Of course, when I first read this I thought of a Beech Starship, because yeah that was cool when I was little.


NASA-2000Starship.jpg
 
It does look like they had no attitude control, at least along the longitudinal axis, because even at the start of reentry the Starship could be seen getting blasted on unshielded areas.

 
The difficult thing is that I am just not sure where we are on whether rocketry is an art or a science. We lambast the Boeing 737 Max for a failure rate which would have made it by far and away the most reliable bomber in WW2. Though if you think about it, the Space Shuttle had a 2.8% fatality rate which is fairly dismal. (I certainly would not get on that, though Peter might) Even the Arian V had a 4% failure rate, though I gather the SpaceX Falcon 9 exceeds that success rate now.

Maybe the issue now is that we are just too risk averse.
 
Winthrop said:
The difficult thing is that I am just not sure where we are on whether rocketry is an art or a science. We lambast the Boeing 737 Max for a failure rate which would have made it by far and away the most reliable bomber in WW2. Though if you think about it, the Space Shuttle had a 2.8% fatality rate which is fairly dismal. (I certainly would not get on that, though Peter might) Even the Arian V had a 4% failure rate, though I gather the SpaceX Falcon 9 exceeds that success rate now.

Maybe the issue now is that we are just too risk averse.
Click to expand...
Thinking waaay back, I think the predicted loss rate for the Space Shuttle was higher than what actually happened.

We're certainly risk averse, probably very much due to the low casualty rate in the first ~25 years of US manned space operations. Wasn't until Challenger that we lost crew during actual space operations. Gave the public an inflated view of how safe space travel was. That basically came out during the Challenger investigation... too many people didn't believe bad things COULD happen.

We're getting into that mode again. Private submarines to the Titanic were viewed as safe, until, suddenly, they weren't. Space tourists abound, but will be interesting to see what happens when (not if, when) some set of billionaires come back as crispy critters...if they come back at all. Even worse is if a crew gets stranded in orbit. Then the media will be loaded with farewell messages, etc, and recriminations on why the people on the ISS can't just stroll over and pick them up.

Ron Wanttaja
 
1710443866689.png


Yeah, we were once prepared for this. And had this happened the names Armstrong and Aldrin would still have been ingrained in every Gen X school kid as much as Washington and Lincoln.

Though NASA has always had very conservative estimates for what spacecraft would accomplish. Granted I doubt anyone thought the Voyager probes would still be sending data, but the Mars rovers were likely really designed to last more than a couple weeks. NASA has an advantage though, they don't need to promise anything to shareholders. Private companies need to be more accurate in their predictions.
 
Space exploration is best left to the government to do. If all these billionaires keep on cluttering up space satellites will start crashing into the debris.
 
Nemo said:
Space exploration is best left to the government to do. If all these billionaires keep on cluttering up space satellites will start crashing into the debris.
Click to expand...
There's no financial advantage for private industry; it's not like there's a profit to be made. It's not like European countries swarming over the New World in the 1500s to the 1700s...no gold, no silver, no way to make exploration pay. Spain's *entire* economy was propped up by the gold brought back for about 300 years. And until we can shed our reliance on chemical rockets, there's no way to make space exploration pay.

Ron Wanttaja
 
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